One in three young professionals do not trust their employer

Almost one in three young professionals do not trust their employer, according to the latest research from recruitment consultants Badenoch & Clark.

When asked whether they trust their employer to deliver accurate information on business performance, 32.2 per cent of 16 – 24 yr olds revealed that they refuse to believe either ‘most’ or ‘any’ of what they are told by their employer. This is in contrast to 18.2 per cent last year, suggesting that Generation Y is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the workplace.

Guy Emmerson, Associate Director of Badenoch & Clark commented, “Without a culture of trust in the workplace, employers will struggle to foster employee engagement and, in-turn, retain their workforce.

“As recruitment activity levels pick up, employers need to consider the strength of their relationship with employees across all levels of the business, or run the risk of staff voting with their feet.

“Younger employees – the so-called Generation Y – have specific expectations of their employers, so encouraging more two-way conversations on business performance will prove vital to increasing levels of trust and gauging job satisfaction. Without this it will be become harder to obtain any kind of staff loyalty and in-turn retain talented graduates.”

Those in the legal profession were particularly sceptical of their employers, with 36.9 per cent of employees across all age ranges stating that they do not believe either ‘most’ or ‘any’ of what their employers tells them about business performance.

A further 26.3 per cent admitted to only trusting ‘parts’ of what their employer tells them and only one in ten (10.5 per cent) stated that they ‘totally trust’ their employer.

By comparison, only 5.9 per cent of HR professionals distrust their employers and almost a quarter of sales and marketing (23.3 per cent) and administration and clerical professionals (23.2) totally trust their employers.

Mr Emmerson continued, “This research highlights the detrimental impact the recession has had on the workforce, not just in terms of job losses and pay freezes, but in terms of the relationship between employer and employee. Now is the time to start repairing this relationship and being more honest and open with employees about business performance.”

Why Your Job Interview Body language Can Help You Win – Or Lose – A New Job

Your job interview body language has more of an impact on your success than anything you say. Exhibiting the right body language can help you convey an enthusiastic, positive and confident attitude to interviewers. So unless you want to end up starring in a scene from “The Office,” watch your body language – it could be the reason why you’re not landing the job you want.

Studies suggest that the nonverbal cues you give during job interviews are more important than verbal ones, and they speak volumes about how you’d perform in a job. Pitch, volume, intonation, pauses and sighs you give when answering also are important, while verbal content – what you actually say – is the least critical aspect.

“Smart candidates know that interviews start as soon as they enter the lobby”. “Set the right tone by being early, and use the extra time to compose yourself. If you’re waiting for a while, don’t pull out pages of notes to review. Instead, check email messages or glance through available magazines or literature in the waiting area. This creates the impression that you’re relaxed before stressful events, and helps you project confidence during the critical early moments of the interview.”

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Graduate employers told to scrap 2.1 minimum

Graduates have called on employers to scrap their minimum requirements of a 2.1 degree.

A poll of more than 600 students and graduates by graduate recruitment specialist Milkround.com found 58 percent want graduate employers to scrap this minimum requirement where it is used.

They want recruiters to understand job suitability cannot be judged solely on degree classification.

Many graduate employers use a 2.1 degree as a benchmark for their recruitment: unless candidates have or are expecting a 2.1 degree they won’t even be considered for a role if they have desirable skills such as relevant experience.

When submitting applications online, 2.2 and third class degree graduates will often be rejected after an initial batch of screening questions, preventing them from giving evidence of their potential employability beyond academic achievement.

Commenting on 2.1 minimum requirements, one respondent said: “The achievement of a 2.1 is arbitrary in terms of grading as some institutions award marks much more liberally than others.”

Another added: “There should be a substitute for people who did not achieve a minimum 2.1, such as a strong extra-curricular background or likewise.”

Londoners willing to travel longest to get to work

A YouGov survey commissioned by Avanta, a welfare to work training and enterprise organisation, shows that 78 per cent of Londoners who are not retired or students are willing to travel for an hour or more (one way) to get to work.

The online survey, conducted earlier in the year questioned 2094 people nationwide, found that 41 per cent of Londoners who are not students or retired are willing to commute for a maximum of an hour each way to get to work, with a further 37 per cent willing to travel for more than an hour, compared to 21 per cent nationally.

Only those who are not retired or students in Scotland were as willing to commute up to an hour each way (41 per cent), although they were less willing to go beyond an hour (five per cent for an hour and fifteen minutes, and seven per cent for an hour and a half).

Least willing commuters who are not students or retired were people in the Midlands, of whom over half (52 per cent) were willing to travel for up to, or less than, 45 minutes (each way). 27 per cent were willing to travel up to an hour, but only 14 per cent were willing to travel for longer.

The survey also found that nationally, those who are not retired or students, most willing to travel up to an hour were unemployed (43 per cent) although those already in full time work were more willing to travel for longer (nine per cent willing to travel an hour and fifteen minutes, and 10 per cent for an hour and a half respectively).

Janette Faherty, CEO of Avanta, said, “London as a city has expanded, but this survey still indicates the dedication Londoners have to their work in order to willingly spend two hours a day, or longer in many cases, travelling. In London, it seems there is an acceptance of a long commute that isn’t necessarily the case in the rest of the country.

“The survey also points towards the efforts made by jobseekers, who are more willing to commute an hour to work than some of those are already in employment, for the opportunity to be the best they can in the workplace. At Avanta, we help unemployed people to find work through skills development, mentoring, training and enterprise so they can fulfill their workplace potential.”

Dyson goes on recruitment drive to develop its brave new world

The British company whose futuristic designs led to the reinvention of the vacuum cleaner is planning to push the boundaries still further by hiring 350 engineers and scientists to work on new products.

Dyson will double the number of people employed in its UK-based research and development department.

The attempt by the company to invest its way into an economic upturn comes eight years after it caused uproar by moving the manufacturing operations of what was seen as a quintessentially English success story to the Far East. About 800 jobs were lost.

Sir James Dyson, the company founder, said yesterday: “We employ 2,500 in total. By taking on another 350 engineers in the UK, our operations will be employing more than 1,600 people as we take on the people we need to grow our intellectual property rights and products.

“We are doing very well despite the recession and we have made the decision to increase our spend on R&D. It may be difficult to find 350 suitably qualified people, [but] despite the country’s failing in investment in education in the engineering sector I am sure we will find the right people. It is vital that Dyson continues to invest to stay at the forefront of industry.”

The new recruits — starters will be paid £45,000 a year — will be working on the next generation of Dyson products. They will also help to develop the digital electric motor technology that has helped the company to register the second-largest number of patents in the UK, after Rolls-Royce. Diversifying away from the vacuum cleaners that made the business famous, Dyson’s recent products have included the Airblade high intensity hand-dryer and the Air Multiplier, a bladeless fan.

The recruitment decision contrasts with the attitude of most British employers, which at best are maintaining R&D spending in the face of uncertain economic recovery. R&D expenditure in Britain fell by 0.5 per cent last year.

The announcement also comes at a politically sensitive moment. In the early years of the Labour Government, Sir James worked closely with Tony Blair helping to produce an innovation policy. That relationship with Labour has soured. Last month, Sir James put his name to Ingenious Britain, a report commissioned by David Cameron to produce a road map for future investment in science and engineering.

Sir James is understood to have felt let down by Labour after his plans to open a dedicated engineering sixth-form college in Bath were blocked. “It was a shame, because we wanted to do it,” Sir James said. “I am not interested in the politics, but I am interested in educating the next generation of engineers.”

Dyson has yet to report its financial performance for 2009. It went into the recession with annual revenues of £628 million and profits of £90 million.

The company’s recruitment drive comes after new figures revealed that there has been no relief from the downsizing of British industry. Statistics from the CBI last week showed that while the manufacturing industry is beginning to recover, deep job cuts of last year are not being reversed. Long-term statistics revealed that the British manufacturing sector has failed to raise employment levels since 2004.

Glasgow underground plans set to boost civil engineering recruitment

Strathclyde Passenger Transport (SPT) has approved plans to redevelop Glasgow’s underground system, which could significantly boost local civil engineering recruitment.

Its partnership committee has agreed in principle to proceed with the £290 million renovation of the network, which will see construction work carried out on all 15 of its stations, including improvements to disabled access.

Having already secured £20 million of funding to start this project, SPT also hopes to receive further financial support from the Scottish government and is set to tender out civil engineering jobs on some of these stations before the end of the year.

Chairman John Findlay commented: “SPT’s plans are realistic and deliverable and have been backed by business leaders, local and national politicians and the public.

“We are grateful for that support and we need to build on all that goodwill.”

Civil engineering recruitment in Scotland is also set to benefit from a recently announced injection of Scottish government funding that will finance projects such as sustainable transport initiatives and improvements to the A9 and A77.

IT sector more likely to recruit students

The IT sector is more likely to hire a student than any other, according to research from jobs site Studentgems.com.

The research shows that 64% were open to paying students to work on specialist projects, while 54% of the automotive industry would also hire students to help when workloads increase.

The research also shows that salesmen are less likely to hire students or outsource projects, with 58% saying extra work is ‘delegated to the most capable staff member’, while in the banking and finance sector, just 19% would give their workload to students

UK firms remain wary despite elevated recruitment figures

The UK’s top 25 firms are back in recruitment mode, with an estimated 2,133 people having been brought on board to UK offices in 2009-10 alone.

However, the total number of hires is still exceeded by the 2,370 people firms made redundant during the downturn, suggesting management caution has far from subsided.

Slaughter and May has hired 78 people during the current financial year, but in line with its conservative approach to lateral hiring all of them were associates and support staff rather than partners.

Slaughters practice partner Paul Olney said: “In general we’ve been hiring fewer than ­normal this year. In certain areas, such as insolvency and restructuring, there’s much more of a vibrant ­market. We have a more generalist ­practice, so our general goal has been to redeploy people where we can. We probably tend to take fewer laterals than other firms.

“We’ve not put a freeze on hiring [support staff], but we’d only want to hire in this still ­uncertain time where we need to add resources.”

Partner recruitment is still a fraction of overall hires among the top 25, while most of the magic circle made no lateral hires at all. The exceptions are Allen & Overy, which brought four ­partners into IP litigation, high-yield and equity capital markets, and Linklaters, which brought in litigation ­partner Christa Band from Herbert Smith.

A senior partner at ­Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer defended the lack of lateral hires at his firm, saying: “We’ve lost fewer people [than other firms], so it’s not surprising if we’ve hired fewer too.”

Nick Woolf, a headhunter at Sainty Hird & Partners, said a lot of the partner hires could be accounted for by opportunistic captures by mid-market outfits of magic circle departees.

“There’s two types of ­lateral hires, one being opportunistic, the other strategic,” he said. “Magic ­circle firms are rarely opportunistic and they don’t have to be. They don’t have many weaknesses, whereas mid-sized firms do have gaps.”

One of the largest groups of partner hires has been at Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP), which has brought in 10 laterals, particularly into finance, tax and litigation. The firm has laid off 85 ­people since autumn 2007.

BLP managing partner Neville Eisenberg said: “Our strategy’s always been to build our capabilities in key areas and hire the best people. The recession ­provided us with more opportunities to hire ­leading individuals, and in doing so we’ve propelled our strategy forward.”

The highest numbers of hires were made by two firms with large volume ­businesses, Irwin Mitchell and Eversheds, which recruited 414 and 293 people ­respectively. Since late 2007 Irwin Mitchell has laid off 16, while Eversheds parted company with 735.

Around 138 of Irwin Mitchell’s hires were fee-earners, the vast majority of whom were into the ­personal injury arm. Eversheds recruited significantly into its volume business, Legal Systems Group.

Eversheds HR director Angus MacGregor said that, despite plans to expand its volume business further, including talk of ­outsourcing to its South Africa office, most of these hires were due to a high churn rate. He added that the high number of hires is also reflective of the firm upgrading its finance and IT capabilities over the past year.

A considerable number of the fee-earner and partner hires across the top 25 are in litigation and regulatory practices, suggesting that bank-on-bank litigation may finally be coming through – a thesis corroborated recently by The Lawyer’s top 10 cases (The Lawyer, 11 January). Out of 14 fee-earner hires at DLA Piper, for example, six were in its litigation and ­regulatory ­division.

DLA Piper chief executive Nigel Knowles said: “What we’re finding is that we’re getting involved in far more cross-border ­litigation and arbitration. We’re the right size for the amount of work we’ve got going on, but we’re always looking to grow in areas of the economy that are set to expand.”

Police recruitment freeze lifted

Gloucestershire police will begin taking on new recruits again from July, after lifting a recruitment freeze which began in April 2009 due to a lack of money.

There are around 100 people who have been waiting to join for the last year and they will be the first to get the chance.

The Constabulary’s first intake of 12 recruits will be in July and they hope to have taken on up to 40 by March 2011.

RCN blasts Tory plans to make savings by freezing recruitment

A Conservative advisor has outlined how £12bn of savings can be made across the public sector, including the NHS, in the first year of a new government.

Tory adviser Sir Peter Gershon suggested these ‘immediate savings’ can be made by tightening controls on public sector recruitment, as well as through a freeze on major new IT spending and renegotiation of contracts with suppliers of goods and services.

He also suggested the savings could be made without affecting the quality of frontline services.

‘There should be a very robust approach to controlling recruitment across the public sector – using natural turnover to cut costs and redeploying existing staff to the vacancies that are agreed to be essential,’ he said.

But Howard Catton, head of policy at the RCN, said the idea nursing teams can stretch and make do in this way is a ‘flawed assumption’.

‘The idea assumes slack in the system, that if you don’t fill a post other colleagues can easily cover and this won’t have impact on patient care. That’s a big assumption to make, and I’m sceptical that there is that degree of slack in the system,’ he said.

RCN’s primary care advisor Lynn Young said: ‘If David Cameron is going to be ruthless about not appointing front line staff, then he will be diminishing front line services. It’s pernicious that people would not be replaced, and it’s as alarming as making people redundant.

‘We will be on our guard and scrutinising about what decisions are being made on reducing expenditure.